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How then did we come to place freedom in the will when we made
out free action to be that produced- or as we also indicated,
suppressed- at the dictate of will?
If what we have been saying is true and our former statement is
consistent with it, the case must stand thus:
Virtue and Intellectual-Principle are sovereign and must be held
the sole foundation of our self-disposal and freedom; both then
are free; Intellectual-Principle is self-confined: Virtue, in its
government of the soul which it seeks to lift into goodness,
would wish to be free; in so far as it does so it is free and
confers freedom; but inevitably experiences and actions are
forced upon it by its governance: these it has not planned for,
yet when they do arise it will watch still for its sovereignty
calling these also to judgement. Virtue does not follow upon
occurrences as a saver of the emperilled; at its discretion it
sacrifices a man; it may decree the jettison of life, means,
children, country even; it looks to its own high aim and not to
the safeguarding of anything lower. Thus our freedom of act, our
self-disposal, must be referred not to the doing, not to the
external thing done but to the inner activity, to the
Intellection, to virtue's own vision.
So understood, virtue is a mode of Intellectual-Principle, a mode
not involving any of the emotions or passions controlled by its
reasonings, since such experiences, amenable to morality and
discipline, touch closely- we read- on body.
This makes it all the more evident that the unembodied is the
free; to this our self-disposal is to be referred; herein lies
our will which remains free and self-disposing in spite of any
orders which it may necessarily utter to meet the external. All
then that issues from will and is the effect of will is our free
action; and in the highest degree all that lies outside of the
corporeal is purely within the scope of will, all that will
adopts and brings, unimpeded, into existence.
The contemplating Intellect, the first or highest, has
self-disposal to the point that its operation is utterly
independent; it turns wholly upon itself; its very action is
itself; at rest in its good it is without need, complete, and may
be said to live to its will; there the will is intellection: it
is called will because it expresses the Intellectual-Principle in
the willing-phase and, besides, what we know as will imitates
this operation taking place within the Intellectual-Principle.
Will strives towards the good which the act of
Intellectual-Principle realizes. Thus that principle holds what
will seeks, that good whose attainment makes will identical with
Intellection.
But if self-disposal is founded thus on the will aiming at the
good, how can it possibly be denied to that principle permanently
possessing the good, sole object of the aim?
Any one scrupulous about setting self-disposal so high may find
some loftier word.
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